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Brian Burke stands his ground on tenure with Leafs: DiManno

Former Leafs GM defends trading for Phil Kessel and stands up for Dion Phaneuf.

Former Leafs GM Brian Burke defends himself against critics by saying, when he left the Leafs, they were a playoff team. "The team I left made the playoffs." Burke is now president of hockey operations with the Flames. (Larry MacDougal / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

He is the perceived Dr. Debacle of all that’s gone so catastrophically wrong with the Maple Leafs, the team that fired him as president and GM in early January 2013, on the eve of the lockout shortened season’s commencement.

As if, these are the ruins that Brian Burke left behind.

“All I’d say is — I left a playoff team,” counters Burke, now hockey potentate of the hugely engaging and upward-trending Flames. “The team I left made the playoffs.”

Indeed, that fact is often overlooked. Those Leafs, with Burke’s clear imprimatur, were the first in nine seasons to qualify for the post-season and extended Boston to seven games in the opening round; would have triumphed if not for a historically epic third-period collapse.

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“You leave a playoff team for the first time in eight, nine years, whatever it was? I’ll let history judge the outcome.”

Yet it was also Burke who, with dramatic wheeling and dealing, amassed the core group of Leafs that are now, latterly, excoriated as rotten to the pith, hence the in-progress dismantling and do-over.

Burke who brought in Dion Phaneuf as perceived franchise cornerstone.

Burke who gave up back-to-back top draft picks for Phil Kessel.

For starters.

“No one was whining about Brian then, or Dion, or Phil. Everyone was saying they finally got it right. That team made the playoffs that spring.

“So that would be my answer. And that will be my last answer. I don’t care what the media in Toronto say about anything.”

But he does add a post-script: “I didn’t make Dion captain. The coach does that. Ron Wilson did that. Ronnie came to me and said, ‘I want to make him captain.’ I said great, I think Dion’s a good captain.”

Burke is extremely reluctant to talk Leafs at all and has avoided doing so since departing, certainly since being named president, hockey operations, for Calgary.

“It’s none of my business. If I was Brendan Shanahan, I wouldn’t want to read a column where Brian Burke is offering insight into what’s right or wrong with the Toronto Maple Leafs. I enjoyed my time there. I’m grateful that I was GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs, that’s quite something. But I’m a Calgary Flame now. The only team I care about is this one. So I wouldn’t address anything — except people who say that I brought in the wrong guys.”

With Toronto, Burke did things dramatically. He loved the spectacle trade, the splashy deal, and revising his own five-year rebuild spec when captivated by a player-trinket. Burke gently objects to that characterization.

“If you look at my history in this game, I give everyone a chance to prove themselves the first year. Then I make my big move.”

Take Kessel, for instance. (Insert vaudevillian joke here.)

“I would do that deal again tomorrow. I felt we were experiencing price-point fatigue in our market. What we charged for tickets and not winning was one thing. What we charged for tickets and not winning and not having a star? I felt we needed a star and I went and got him.

“The guy’s money in the bank, 35 goals every year, on a struggling team. Can you imagine if it was a high-powered offensive team, what Phil Kessel could do?”

At the moment, given his horrid scoring slumps, we have difficult recalling what Kessel has done, as recently as pre-Jan. 1.

Burke was asked, given his continued high regard for Phaneuf, whether he would have interest in bringing the endlessly slammed blue-liner back whence he came — Calgary. Which, whether answered yea or nay, would of course come too close to league tampering and invite a fine from NHL HQ. So Burke is cautious.

“A player who plays with passion, intelligence, intensity, ferocity — did you see his hit on T.J. Oshie the other night? There’s room for a player like that on any team. But I’m not allowed to express interest in a particular player.”

Still: “It’s become fashionable to throw rocks at Dion. But the fact of the matter is he’s a pretty darn good player.”

Burke repeats what others have said about the onerous load that has been placed on Phaneuf’s shoulders since his arrival in Toronto.

“They play him too much. He’s fatigued by the end of the game. He’s up against the top centres on every team — Sidney, Tavares, Getzlaf. Those are hard minutes, chasing the stars around. They’re like dog years — seven minutes (per minute). He’s fatigued by the end of the game. Five-on-five, they never do anything against him in the first two periods, then he gets tired. He’s on the first power play, he’s on the first penalty kill — it’s too much.”

Phaneuf, his actress wife Elisha Cuthbert and Joffrey Lupul, of course, have threatened a lawsuit against TSN and the Twitter troll who made a salacious (also untrue) crack about the threesome which inexplicably appeared on the network’s screen crawl on trade deadline day. Their law firm is the same outfit Burke hired (and with whom he serves as an associate counsel) when going after odious bloggers who posted utterly libelous (and false) personal remarks about him, most distastefully that he’d fathered sports broadcaster Hazel Mae’s child.

“You want to write that Brian Burke is a jerk? That’s your right. But if you’re going to make statements of fact about me, you better make sure it’s right.”

In this case — as twice before, in successful lawsuits against mainstream media — it was profoundly wrong and Burke made legal history in Canada when the presiding judge (in B.C.) ruled the perpetrators could be served with notice on the Internet using their online handles (ie. “Slobberface.”)

“I got what I wanted, which was to change the law,” says Burke. “The plan is to still proceed individually against some of them with any reward going to charity. You can’t say things that weren’t true happened, and if you do you can get sued. And people are finding that out the hard way.”

Being Burke — at the very least, it’s never boring. Life around him crackles.

But, in Calgary, it’s not so perpetually raucous, histrionic, crazed.

“I’m still president of hockey operations. There’s less stress in the job but enough to make a difference. And yeah, I love living here.”

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